Shams Irfan

The controversy over the location of Central University is boiling. With Kashmir watching calmly,the issue is  gathering drama in Jammu where students have been involved in the movement

Ibrahim Wani reads Nobel Laureate and Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s most political novel, Snow.
When snow falls, it blankets and covers the world in whiteness where every colour is erased by white. White homogenizes the world. Then snow melts and disappears. With this the world reverts back to its old ways and forgets the world that was a white expanse.
The novel “Snow” by Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 Nobel Prize winner synonyms the journey of snow with human emotion. In this novel everything is in a state of constant change, in a state of unbecoming like snow, and thus snow here becomes the reference point of everything human beings are capable of. The novel vividly catches the divides in Turkey and the constant struggles of identities between the Islam and the West, the Oriental and the secular Kemalist, and the Kurd and the Turk.
This novel revolves around Ka, a lonely poet, an exilee Turk visiting Kars, a Kurdish town in Turkey as a journalist for a Turkish newspaper. He is to cover the city elections and a rise in the suicides by young girls allegedly over a headscarf ban in educational institutions. The headscarf ban issue has polarized Kars and the suicides by girls unable to bear the humiliation of not wearing a headscarf to school have only deepened the fault-lines between religion and the secularist state.